It wasn’t long after Bouldin Creek Coffeehouse announced it was moving early last year that the other shoe dropped: Larry McGuire and Tom Moorman Jr. of Lamberts and Perla’s would be putting a Vietnamese restaurant in its place. “Just a neighborhoody thing,” McGuire said at the time. But it’s more than that. Elizabeth Street Cafe opened in December as a white and aquamarine French colonial bungalow with an ambitious mission to bake its own bread and pastries, serve breakfast, run a coffeeshop and do lunch and dinner. The breakfast menu is full of egg dishes, from a breakfast banh mi sandwich to steam buns with pork belly and scrambled eggs to eggs baked en cocotte in the French style.

Breakfast tapers off at 10:30, and lunch called for a big bowl of Vietnamese soup, one with pork broth, rice noodles, meatballs, pork belly and a soft-boiled egg. I’m reluctant to call it “pho,” because pho is traditionally made with beef broth. And pho usually comes with a more generous side plate of herbs, bean sprouts and jalapeño. And pho doesn’t usually cost $14 a bowl.

The coarse little meatballs are angry with salt, and the pork belly is as tender as fall-apart carnitas. In this aromatic swirl of star anise and clove, the egg is more than a protein grenade. It explodes when you cut into it, drawing the soft-solid of the yolk into the soup, coalescing into drops of Congdon Farms gold throughout the bowl. Gold. That must be what makes it $14.